Wednesday, August 5, 2015

The next BriefingsDirect big data innovation case study interview investigates how Localytics uses data and associated analytics to
help providers of mobile applications improve their applications --
and also allow them to better understand the uses for their apps and dynamic customer demands.

To learn more about how big data helps mobile application developers better
their products and services, please join Andrew Rollins, Founder and Chief Software Architect at Localytics, based in Boston. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Tell us about your organization. You founded it to do what?

Rollins: We
founded in 2008, two other guys and I. We set out initially to
make mobile apps. If you remember back in 2008, this is when the iPhone App Store launched. So there was a lot of excitement around mobile apps at that time.

We ended up focusing on
whether there was a services play in this industry and we settled on
analytics, which we then called Localytics. The analogy we like to use
is, at the time it was a little bit of a gold rush, and we want to sell
the pickaxes. So that’s what we did.

Gardner: That
makes a great deal of sense, and it has certainly turned into a gold
rush. For those folks who do the mining, creating
applications, what is it that they need to know?

Analytics and marketing

Rollins: That’s
a good question. Here's a little back story on what we do. We do
analytics, but we also do marketing. We're a full-service solution,
where you can measure how your application is performing out in the
wild. You can see what your users are doing. You can do anything from funnel analysis to engagement analysis, things like that.

From
there, we also transition into the marketing side of things, where you
can manage your push notifications, your in/out messaging.

For people who are making mobile apps, often
they want to look at key metrics and then how to drive those metrics.
That means a lot of A/B testing, funnel analysis, and engagement analysis.

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It
means not only analyzing these things, but making meaningful
interactions, reaching out to customers via push notifications, getting
them back in the app when they are not using the app, identifying points
of drop-off, and messaging them at the right time to get them back in.
An
example would be an e-commerce app. You've abandoned the shopping cart.
Let’s get you back in the application via some sort of messaging. Doing
all of that, measuring the return on investment (ROI) on
that, measuring your acquisition channels, measuring what your users
are doing, and creating that feedback loop is what we advocate mobile
app developers do.

Gardner: You're able to do data-driven marketing in a way that may not have been
very accessible before, because everything that’s done with the app is
digital and measurable. There are logs, servers -- and so somewhere there's
going to be a trail. It’s not so much marketing as it is science.
We've always thought of marketing as perhaps an art and less of a
science. How do you see this changing the very nature of marketing?

Everything
ultimately that you are doing really does need to be data-driven. It's
very hard to work off just intuition alone.

Rollins: Everything
ultimately that you are doing really does need to be data-driven. It's
very hard to work off of just intuition alone. So that's the art and
science. You come out with your initial hypothesis, and that’s a little
bit more on the craft or art side, where you're using your intuition to
guide you on where to start.

From there, you have to
use the data to iterate. I'm going to try this, this, and this, and then
see which works out. That would be like a typical multivariate kind of
testing.

Determine what works out of all these concepts
that you're trying, and then you iterate on that. That's where
measuring anything you do, any kind of interaction you have with your
user, and then using that as feedback to then inform the next
interaction is what you have to be doing.

Gardner: And
this is also a bit revolutionary when it comes to software development. It
wasn't that long ago that the waterfall approach to development might
leave years between iterations. Now, we're thinking about constantly
updating, iterating, getting a feedback loop, and condensing the latency
of that feedback loop so that we really can react as close to real-time
as possible.

What is it about mobile apps that's allowed for a whole different approach to this notion of connectedness and feedback loops to an app audience?

Mobile apps are different

Rollins: This
brings up a good point. A lot of people ask why we have a mobile app
analytics company. Why did we do that? Why is typical web analytics not
good enough? It kind of speaks to something that you're talking about.
Mobile apps are a little bit different than the regular web, in the
sense that you do have a cycle that you can push apps out on.

However, there are certain interactions you
can have, like on the messaging side, where you have an ability to
instantly go back and forth. Mobile apps are a different kind of market.
It requires a little different understanding than the traditional
approach.

... We consume the data in a real-time
pipeline. We're not doing background batch processing that you might see
in something like Hadoop.
We're doing a lot of real-time pipeline stuff, such that you can see
results within a minute or two of it being uploaded from a device.
That's largely where HP Vertica comes in, and why we ended up using Vertica, because of its real-time nature. It’s about the scale.

Become a member of myVertica todayRegister nowGain access to the free HP Vertica Community Edition

Gardner: If
I understand correctly, you have access to the data from all these
devices, you are crunching that, and you're offering reports and
services back to your customers. Do they look to you as also a platform
provider or just a data-service provider? How do the actual hosting and
support services for these marketing capabilities come about?

Rollins: We
tend to cater more toward the high end. A lot of our customers are
large app publishers that have an ongoing application, let’s say a
shopping application or news application.

In that
sense, when we bring people on board, oftentimes they tend to be larger
companies that aren’t necessarily technically savvy yet about mobile,
because it's still new for some people. We do offer a lot of onboarding
services to make sure they integrate their application correctly,
measure it correctly, and are looking at the right metrics for their
industry, as compared to other apps in that industry.

Then,
we keep that relationship open as they go along and as they see data.
We iterate on that with them. Because of the newness of the industry it
does require education.

Gardner: And where is HP Vertica running for you? Do you run it on your own data center? Are you using cloud? Is there a hybrid? Do you have some other model?

Running in the cloud

Rollins: We run it in the cloud. We are running on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
We've thought a lot about whether we should run it in a separate data
center, so that we can dictate the hardware, but presently we are
running it in AWS.

Gardner: Let’s talk about
what you can do when you do this correctly. Because you have a capacity
to handle scale, you've developed speed, and you understand the
requirements in the market, what are your customers getting from the
ability to do all this?

Rollins: It really
depends on the customer. Something like an e-commerce app is going to
look heavily at things like where users are dropping off and what's
preventing them from making that purchase.

Another
application, like news, which I mentioned, will look at something
different, usually something more along the lines of engagement. How
long are they reading an article for? That matters to them, so that they
can give those numbers to advertisers.

So the answer to that largely depends on who you are and what your app is. Something like an e-commerce app is going to
look heavily at things like where users are dropping off and what's
preventing them from making that purchase.

Something like an e-commerce app is going to
look heavily at things like where users are dropping off and what's
preventing them from making that purchase.

Gardner: I
suppose another benefit of developing these insights, as specific and
germane as they might be to each client, is the ability to draw
different types of data in. Clearly, there's the data from the App Store
and from the app itself, but if we could join that data with some other
external datasets, we might be able to determine something more about why they
drop-off or why they are spending more, or time doing certain things.

So
is there an opportunity, and do you have any examples of where you've
been able to go after more datasets and then be able to scale to that?

Rollins: This
is something that's come up a lot recently. In the past year, we have
our own products that we're launching in this space, but the idea of
integrating different data types is really big right now.

You
have all these different silos -- mobile, web, and even your internal
server infrastructure. If you're a retail company that has a mobile app,
you might even have physical stores. So you're trying to get all this
data in some collective view of your customer.

Become a member of myVertica todayRegister nowGain access to the free HP Vertica Community Edition

You want
to know that Sally came to your store and purchased a particular kind
of item. Then, you want to be able to know that in your mobile app.
Maybe you have a loyalty card that you can tie across the media and then
use that to engage with her meaningfully about stuff that might
interest her in the mobile app as well.
"We noticed that you bought this a month ago. Maybe you need another one. Here is a coupon for it."

Other datasets

That's
a big thing, and we're looking at a lot of different ways of doing that
by bringing in other datasets that might not be from just a mobile app
itself.

Gardner: For
those organizations that are embarking on more of a data-driven
business model, that are looking for analytics and platforms and
requirements, is there anything that you could offer in hindsight having
traveled this path and worked with HP Vertica. What should they keep in
mind when they're looking to move into a capability, maybe it's on-prem,
maybe it's cloud. What advice could you offer them?

At
scale, you have to know what each technology is good at, and how you
bring together multiple technologies to accomplish what you want.

Rollins: The
journey that we went through was with various platforms. At the end of
day, be aware of what the vendor of the big-data platform is pitching,
versus the reality of it.

A lot of times, prototyping
is very easy, but actually going to large scale is fairly difficult. At
scale, you have to know what each technology is good at, and how you
bring together multiple technologies to accomplish what you want.

That
means a lot of prototyping, a lot of stress testing and benchmarking.
You really don’t know until you try it with a lot of these things. There
are a lot of promises, but the reality might be different.

Gardner: Any thoughts about Vertica’s track record, given your length of experience?

Rollins: They're
really good. I'm both impressed with the speed of it as compared to
other things we have looked at, as well as the features that they
release. Vertica 7 has a bunch of great stuff in it. Vertica 6, when it
came out, had a bunch of great stuff in it. I'm pretty happy with it.

Built on up-to-date HP, Intel,
and VMware technologies, the CS 250 combines a virtual server and storage
infrastructure that HP says is configurable in minutes for nearly half the price
of competitive systems. It is designed for
virtual desktops and remote office productivity, as well as to provide a flexible path to hybrid cloud. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect.]

Designed to attract customers on a tight budget, the HP CS 250 includes a
new three-node configuration that is up to 49 percent more cost
effective than comparable configurations from Nutanix, SimpliVity and other competitors, says HP. Because HP's StoreVirtual runs in VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V and KVM virtual environments, the appliance may soon come to support all those hypervisors.

Increasingly, even small IT shops want to modernize and simplify how they support existing applications.
They want virtualization benefits to extend to storage, backup and
recovery, and be ready to implement and consume some cloud services.
They want the benefits of software-defined data centers (SDDC),
but they don’t want to invest huge amounts of time, money, and risk in a
horizontal, pan-IT modernization approach.

That's why, according to IDC,
businesses are looking for flexible infrastructure solutions that will
allow them to quickly deploy and run new applications. This trend has
resulted in a 116 percent year-over-year increase in hyper-converged
systems sales and 60 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) anticipated through 2019.The growth in the building blocks approach to IT
infrastructure is building rapidly. IDC estimates that in 2015, $10.2 billion
will be spent on converged systems, representing 11.4 percent of total IT
infrastructure spending. This number will grow to $14.3 billion by 2018,
representing 14.9 percent of total IT infrastructure spending, says IDC.
Similarly, Technology Business Research, Inc. in Hampton, NH, estimates a $10.6
billion U.S. addressable market over the next 12 months, through mid-2016.

With HCIAs specifically, enterprises can begin making what amounts to mini-clouds based on their required workloads and use
cases. IT can quickly deliver the benefits of modern IT architectures
without biting off the whole cloud model. Virtual desktops is a great place to begin, especially as Windows 10 is emerging on the scene.Indeed, VDI deployments that support as many as 250 desktops on a single appliance at a remote office or agency, for example, allow for ease in
administration and deployment on a small footprint while keeping costs
clear and predictable. And, if the enterprise wants to scale up and out
to hybrid cloud, they can do so with ease and low risk.

Multi-site continuity

The inclusion of three 4TB StoreVirtual Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA)
licenses also allows the
new HP CS 250 system to replicate data to any other HP
StoreVirtual-based solution. This means that customers can leverage
their existing infrastructure as a replication target at no additional
cost, says HP. The CS 250 also allows customers to tailor the system with a
choice of up to 96 processing cores, a mix of SSD and SAS disk drives, and up to 2TB of memory per 4-node appliance -- double that of previous generations.

The CS 250 arrives pre-configured for VMware's vSphere 5.5 or 6.0 and HP OneView
InstantOn to enable customers to be production-ready with only 5
minutes of keyboard time and a total of 15 minutes deployment time, with
daily management from VMware vCenter via the HP OneView for VMware vCenter plug-in, says HP.

HP sees the CS 250 as a oath to bigger things. For midsize and enterprise customers seeking an efficient and cost-effective cloud entry point, for example, the new HP Helion CloudSystem 9.0
built on the CS 250 provides
a direct path to the hybrid cloud. This hyper-converged cloud solution
leverages the clustered compute and storage resources of the CS 250 for
on-premise workloads but adds self-service portal provisioning and
public cloud bursting features for those moving beyond server
virtualization.

HP announced that it is enhancing its “Nitro” partner program and
opening it up to distributors worldwide, starting with Arrow Electronics
in the US.

HP is also introducing new
Software-Defined Storage Design and Integration services to help
customers deploy highly scalable, elastic cloud storage services, the company announced today. The integration
service provides customers with detailed configuration and
implementation guidance tailored to their specific needs to accelerate
time to value, said HP.

The 4-node CS 250-HC StoreVirtual is available on August 17, while 3-node configurations are available on September 28. A sample solution price inclusive of the 3-node CS250 with Foundation Carepack and VMware vSphere Enterprise starts at a list price of $121,483, said HP.